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by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Episode: s02e02 In the Shadow of Two Gunmen Part II, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-07-28
Updated: 2001-07-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 04:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14783364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: "She is wary of the fact that, above everything else, he now has this."





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**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

Title: relapse   
Author: august   
Spoilers: Set sometime after 'The Shadow of Two Gunmen', or thereabouts.   
Codes: CJ/Toby, baby!   
Archives: With thanks.

Summary: CJ/Toby. "She is wary of the fact that, above everything else, he now has this."

With love, and much driving to the sea, to the tense-busting Penelopody. 

*

It begins, and begins, again.

*

There is a young girl playing a guitar in the park. She's loud, but not good, and because CJ does not believe in pity-busking, she walks straight past.

Washington has seasons. Snow melts, leaves fall, coats go into storage. She misses the sun, but LA never made her look forward to going to work.

She's old enough that she's stopped measuring her time in years. It's people and places that stick in her mind. Before Washington. After Tim.

And, for now at least, the autumns belong to Toby.

Her father had told her that only students and Admirals had free time in the middle of the day. Yet here they are, the White House Press Secretary and the White House Director of Communications, standing in the middle of a carefully cultivated park.

Her father has never really believed in the public service.

It's old, this thing between them, older than the year it actually spans. She remembers kissing Toby in her lounge room. Leaf mulch had stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and then her carpet. It's his now, her autumn, inexplicably tied to him like the smell of cigar smoke.

She is wary of the fact that, above everything else, he now has this.

It is lunch time, or thereabouts, and he has dragged her outside, muttering something about children in the attic and stunted deformities. She doesn't think too much of it, although vaguely recalls that Margaret is reading a book and sunshine and success. Sunshine and progress. Sunshine and something.

It's one of these secrets things they know about each other. Leo's PA has a subversive influence on Toby's eating regime. He still drinks more scotch than he should, but he once went without beef for a week on Margaret's instigation.

The loud, not-good girl is singing the theme song from Scooby Doo, and she smiles at these kids who can't recycle anything except the trash, and she's trying not to think she's walked around this park with Toby before, in a time when it seemed a hell of a lot easier.

He pulls a small plastic bag out of his pocket and she laughs, out loud, at the sight of Toby throwing bread crumbs to the birds.

He offers: "I bought them from a guy on the corner. He had no shoes."   
"You don't strike me as a bird person."   
"I would be horrified if I did."

She chuckles, a little, and then looks away. They walk in silence, and she hates these times when she's just not sure enough of herself to pull him to her. When she's not sure if that's what she still wants.

They walk.

"It's going to be like this, sometimes." He says quietly, standing half a metre away from her and tossing stale bread in the wind.

A million things run through her brain, and the loudest is the fact that Toby seems to have this periodic amnesia when it comes to the fact that she is an intelligent, grown woman. And that she's not the one with the failed marriage, although she pulls that back, it's not hers to use.

So she stops walking, and says, "find me in my office when you finish up tonight; you can apologise for talking to me like a teenager."

And she walks away.

*

It's like swimming, she decides. It's the difference between swimming and drowning. It's the moment before the jump. It's cutting and still missing the bone.

She is on her bed, lying on her stomach, idly taking notes from a briefing book and keeping an eye on the television. She has spent many � most � Sundays like this lately, although now she is beginning to call Toby's bed her own.

And even though the first time she had slept with him had been nearly a decade ago, and there was exactly one marriage and seventeen other people between that and now, she still feels like giggling when he begins to touch her.

But then, like today, he presses her against the mattress, and she turns into him and flattens against him. Silence falls between them easily, too easily for people who live in words, and she's yet to decide whether that's a thing to be cherished, to be held, to be put in a box under her bed and found when she's dead.

She's scared of him sometimes, like this, in an abstract way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with failure. She wants to keep this, wants it to be kept, and as he moves in her and against her, she is aware of the impossibility of it all.

It's so close to disappointment, this kind of love, that it almost breaks her skin.

*

When she was twenty seven, she lived above a couple in a studio apartment. She saw them, occasionally, disappearing into the building but they had their record player hooked up to, what she imagined, were huge speakers because for weeks and weeks she would hear the same Springsteen album, rising up through her floorboards.

And she didn't mind, not really, the constant music. She was twenty seven, she was still young and she found it charming to have a constant soundtrack to her life.

She did not know that, years later, the first notes of a song off those albums would send her back. And at nights, she would never be able to sleep in silence again.

*

Months ago, more than a year ago now, Bartlet dragged them across the city for a walking dinner tour. Josh talked him down from the idea of touring national parks, and they settled on a history of various districts of Washington. With dinner. And alcohol.

Sometimes she is sure that the Secret Service curses the fact that a freak was elected to the office of President.

Toby was flirty, that night, and it could have been a dangerous thing except she has spent years learning how to turn that off. Like the time he and Sam drank a bottle of scotch at a Karaoke bar, and despite his fifteen minute treatise on the evils of Karaoke, he stood up on stage and said "this one's for you" to her.

It was easier not to think about it, or to laugh, or to get up on stage and do Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Relax' back.

"So, you wanna know what I think?" He said, falling in step beside her.

She had been musing on shoes, and stones, and winter. This winter had seemed to go on forever, and she was sick of the fact that every pair of shoes she owned were scuffed by the stones embedded in the ice.

"It doesn't really matter what I answer, does it?"   
He pointedly ignored her. "I think that you're clearly in love with me."   
"Clearly in love with you?"   
"Yes." He nodded, and she knew the smirk that was hiding underneath his beard.   
"Hmph. Interesting."   
"It is, isn't it?"

She smiled at him, and then looked away. He was like her good luck charm when he was like this, drunk and flirty, and it never meant anything, not the next day, not when Leo and Josh are walking behind them.

Except that he was insistent, and she only remembered one other time he was like that, and then she did everything she could not to remember it. Usually he drops back, and she is never really sure the next day whether it is a joke.

She turned this over in her mind.

"So what are we going to do about it?" It took her a moment to realise that he was still walking next to her, and that he was talking.   
"It?"   
"Your unadulterated love for me."   
"It's unadulterated now? Impressive."   
"Yes, you're clearly intoxicated by my presence."   
She nodded, seriously. "Clearly."   
"Clearly." He said again, and she was conscious of the way the word shaped itself in his mouth.   
"Hmph."

Later, when she thinks about that night, she is never sure how a party of fifteen and fifteen secret service agents did not notice him pull her into a side street. She is never completely convinced that they didn't.

But his hands were on her arm then, and she was mildly mad at herself for letting him calling the shots, again.

"Toby, we're going to lose the group."   
"We lost the group when he suggested we make this field-trip-from-hell a monthly occurrence," he muttered and she laughed. And she noticed him watch her laugh.   
"Toby, seriously, what are you doing?"   
"Seriously, I'm thinking about kissing you. I thought I'd improvise after that."   
She looked out onto the main street. "Toby."   
"That's three times in about thirty seconds you've said that, CJ."   
She stared straight at him. "Toby."

"In New York, that time in New York-" he began.   
"-No."   
"That time in New York, I should have done things better. But I had to try with Andi."   
"I know."   
"And I never apologised."   
"Yes."   
"Yes, what?"   
"Yes, you did apologise. And, furthermore, you shouldn't. Because she was your wife, Toby, it's what you should have done."   
"I just...I wanted to say I'm sorry."

She sighed, painfully sober, and replied, "You do, all the time. Each time, like this. I remember it, Toby, because it's the only time you ever apologise about a thing by actualyl using the word 'sorry'."

He began to say something, and she cut him off.

"I remember because I had a shirt made up. 'Toby apologised to me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt'."   
"CJ..."   
"Oh, what? What, Toby? Once every eight months you get drunk and decide I'm the love of your life. So, what? What do you want me to do with that?"

She laid her hand on his arm, like an old friend, and he stared at it.

"This is old Toby, this thing. It's over."   
"I don't think I want it to be," he said, quietly.   
"Ha." Quieter. And it wasn't a laugh.   
"Come home with me, CJ."

She wished, then, that she wasn't the type of person people invited home when they drunk. She didn't reply.

"Come home with me, CJ." He repeated.   
"No."

From the look on his face, she guessed it was about the last thing he has expected her to say. She didn't recognise the street they were on, and she was conscious of the fact that Toby seemed to have lost his overcoat.

He looked somewhere between an apology and mortification. And, over a year ago on that unknown street, she reached to flick the collar of his coat. "But if you call me, Toby, and ask me tomorrow, the answer will be different."

*

It's not that things have changed, exactly, but she feels off balance, just a little bit off balance. She feels four steps away from calling it the biggest mistake of her life, from packing it in and moving to Idaho to become a potato farmer.

She tells her sister this jokingly, of course, and tries to ignore the edge of desperation in her laughter and the fact that she stares at the phone long after she has hung up.

*

They do not talk about the shooting, not really. No one in the West Wing does.

There are curt replies, standard responses. After the police and the secret service and the psychs and the media, it's enough. And so they read interviews to find out what each other thought, felt, saw. And it's enough.

Except that she's noticed people have developed these things. The President watches Charlie like a hawk, like an apology. Leo is on a crusade against violence in the media. And although he would hate that she knows it, Toby keeps articles about gunshot victims from around the world.

The growing scrappy file in his bottom drawer scares her in ways she's not sure she's allowed to feel.

She tries to tell herself that she does not know what she does, what her thing is and a part of her suspects that the thing that let her do the briefing that night is the thing that keeps her together now. When Josh was talking physics and vectors, she knew what her action-reaction was.

She never talks about the shooting. She did the briefing, she answers the question, but she never lets it enter her mind in her own time.

And then Toby, with his manila folder of clippings tucked under one armed, strolls into Leo's office with a gun-control proposal and steals that from her, too.

"No," she says, firmly, after he finished outlining grandiose, idealistic plan.   
"CJ, listen. It's-"   
"-Toby..." Leo walks towards him.   
"Leo!! Come on! Let's do politics. Let's forget about us, and play the game. This is the time."   
"No." Leo shakes his head. "It isn't."   
"We're the ones who can say this!"   
She looks him straight in the eye and says, "no, we're the only ones who can't."   
"With all due respect, CJ-"   
"Because we're victims, Toby," Leo interrupts. "And whatever we do, we'll be see as the victims. It won't be about the President making good legislation, it'll be about some guy, who got shot, getting angry at every crazy who has a gun."   
"So they not only shot at us, they take away our right to stop them shooting at us again?" Toby counters, angrily.   
"Yes," she replies, gently, resting her hand on his forearm. "And you know it, too."

And his gaze shifts to her and she knows she's right. She knows he knew it all along. And she's scared of this scrappy man and his scrappy file because of the way he looks at her, like she should be the one to make it all right.

*

Everyone goes for a drink later that night. Because it's been a long day, because they still like to keep Josh occupied. Except now she has Toby to think of, and he's quiet in her car and she knows he won't touch her tonight, unless she makes the first move.

He's scared of her. And she's scared of him. And.

She realises, again, how hard it is to do this thing without seeming like they're doing this thing. They've never really talked about it, about what the West Wing will think, because they've both been professionals before they've been anything else for so long now, there didn't seem to be another way.

Inside the bar, Sam asks her to name the last five people in the world she would sleep with and Toby is drawn into a conversation with Josh. And this is it, this is their life.

He buys her a drink, and smiles when he rests it in front of her.

"Hey, Ms Cregg." He calls out to her, over Josh's head.   
"Hey, Mr Ziegler." She returns.

And then she smiles again as his hand is on her jaw, pulling her to him over Josh. And she kisses him, slowly, realising the conversation has stopped around them, realising that Josh is whimpering below them, muttering "my eyes, my eyes!"

And, as napkins and peanuts fly towards their heads, Toby draws her to him, shielding her head with his jacket. And she feels tetherless, as peanuts bounce off his jacket, and land on Josh's head.

Later that night, when the bar is closing up and she is leaning on Toby and Josh can't keep his hands off Sam's knee, she is struck by the fact that this is what they've done. And she watches Josh and Sam get into the same taxi, and smiles. Because they have that.

*

They live in words, it's something she's always known. Toby was trained as a lawyer, and there are times when she realises the exactitude of legislation and constitutions never really leaves him. But she was trained in the media, in public relations, so between them they can write and speak and close the bar with their arguments.

And then they don't talk, about some things, and there's safety in that. She can hold fort against the press corp and get in the President's face, but she can't think for more than a few seconds about Andi, the India thing, or the fact that the first time she slept with him was the first time she woke up in bed with a married man, without it burning, like coffee on her tongue.

They were in New York City once, years ago now, and it was a different Toby who put his hand through the window of his car. And she was the one who fixed it up, who talked him down, who drove him to hospital.

This Toby now, the Washington Toby who will argue on just about anything except the things he should, is a different thing entirely. And she knows that's a relationship thing, that he's been told his angers burns. And she wants to tell him that she's not like that, that she relishes anger, the things that she can hold.

So, sometimes, they stand outside her front door step and argue in the snow about something, anything, even though they both agree that Iraq is a target only because it's an easy one and their hands are tired.

Or, like tonight, they are sitting in his car, parked in Leo's driveway, while the engine settles around them. And she knows, really, that the establishment of a national DNA database for convicted felons is a fundamental privacy violation, not to mention a contradiction to the idea of a responsible criminal justice system. But she argues anyway, because it's easier than talking about things, other things, like Toby in the park with stale bread in his hands.

And so he's in a tuxedo and she's in her red dress and Leo's birthday present rests on the back seat of the car. And he bangs his hand on his knee to emphasis his point, and she grips the steering wheel and they sit in silence, for a long time, before she speaks.

"You know, I don't really know what I'm doing here either, Toby."   
"What?"   
"I don't." She unbuckles her belt and watches it slid back into the holder. "And I think we need to stop feeling bad for that."   
He looks like he's about to argue, to disagree but then leans across and touches the metal buckle now resting above her shoulder. "Yeah."   
"Yeah." She says, softly.   
He looks at her a long time, much longer than he usually lets himself, before speaking. "I don't want this to be like...before."   
"It's not before, it's not any of the befores."   
"I know."   
"And," she says, speaking quickly, "if it is, then it is. And that's the way it will be."   
"I know," he repeats.   
"I know you do. And you know I do. So what are we doing here?"   
He looks at her again, but quickly this time, before muttering, "avoiding Mandy?"

And she laughs, and pulls his face to her, and they're twisted in their seats as they kiss, and she's happy, now, because he's funny. And all the other things, too.

And minutes later, when they're standing by his car and she's tangled a leg around his ankle, refusing to let him move, she wants to laugh again as Josh coughs obviously behind them.

"They're probably late, they were telling me in there. Probably caught in traffic." He saunters up to them, and rests against the bonnet. "Toby probably lost his tuxedo, again, they said."   
"Josh..." Toby growls, and she loves his warning growl.   
"But no. Imagine the truth, they were making out in the car like teenagers. Teenagers, CJ!"   
"What can I say? Toby knows how to treat a lady." And she smiles at Toby, and he rests his hand behind her neck.   
Josh shakes himself and mutters, "I feel like I just caught my parents making out or something."

She glares and Toby coughs out a laugh.

"We were just coming inside, Josh. We were just talking," she says.   
"I just, you know what, I just don't want to know." Josh grimaces, and Toby reaches for her hand, smiling. Josh grimaces again, and she pulls Toby to her, kissing him lightly on the mouth.

He is smiling against her lips as Josh walks away.

*

The CD changes, the mechanical whir of the player ringing dull in the darkened room.

As she gulps for air, she becomes aware of his hand on her hip, and his arm by her head, holding his body above her. And it has been a long night like this, a slow night. She forgets this part, sometimes, and the realisation makes her drapes an arm around his neck, pulling him closer.

There is music in the background, and she knows this CD has already played tonight, she remembers Toby's mouth on her during 'Dulcinea'. She has pulled Toby closer to her, and his lips rest clumsily by her ear. She forgets this part, sometimes, forgets that he moves in her, that there are these long, slow nights.

The CD changes, again and again. 

*fin   
http://appelsini.tripod.com

  


End file.
